The sheer pace and drama of British politics in recent years is such that big things are in danger of going unprocessed. Take the Brexit vote, which has been causing Labour renewed agonies this week. Last summer, a leave campaign that foregrounded xenophobic demagoguery was victorious in a national referendum, a result immediately followed by a wave of hate crimes. It was in that same febrile atmosphere that a pro-migrant MP was murdered in broad daylight by a rightwing extremist who portrayed his victim as a “traitor”.
It should be uncontroversial to recognise these as symptoms of a society with a deeply dysfunctional sense of itself and of others. Yet one searches mainstream politics in vain for any frank acknowledgement of this problem, let alone serious attempts to confront, analyse and tackle it. Indeed, the right, left and centre of the Labour party seem, to varying degrees, to be lapsing back into the same habits on national identity and immigration that contributed so much to the conditions that made Brexit possible.
Take the newly created English Labour Network, whose aim of fostering a sense of national community in tune with Labour values is fundamentally laudable, but whose key figures are doing little to inspire confidence.
John Denham, for example, laments that “we live in a society where all sorts of multiple identities are possible, but it’s almost as though Englishness is the one that’s not legitimate,” a disingenuous echoing of rightwing grievances that ignores the concrete differences in how these identities are performed and experienced. He blithely asserts that “we certainly should not fear our own national flag”, without displaying any interest in how such symbols have acquired intimidating connotations in certain contexts.
Both Denham and Liam Byrne stress that they want good, not bad, patriotism. But Byrne also asks us not to dwell on “dusty history”, as if the toxic nature of modern jingoism isn’t derived precisely from the predominant chauvinistic version of our nation’s past. It will take more than a half-baked rebranding exercise to deal with these deep-seated issues. After Brexit, the idea that our national identity should be simply celebrated rather than critically re-examined is not only irrational but deeply irresponsible. Currently, the ELN looks more like a triangulating appeal to rightwing voters than a serious project for reimagining and building a more inclusive England, with all the difficult conversations that will necessarily involve.
This is connected to a wider strand of thinking in and around the Labour party that sees xenophobia and racism as confined to a minority of cranks on society’s fringe, with the current high levels of public antipathy towards immigrants being due for the most part to nothing more than the “legitimate concerns” of primarily working-class voters. It’s a view resting on spectacular naivety about the true nature and breadth of prejudice in Britain (which is in no way class-specific), as well as the misconception that it is experience of, rather than prejudice about, immigration that drives this antipathy.
This narrative becomes a shade more sinister when the dubious category of the “white working class” (apparently neglected more due to its whiteness than its class) is elevated to the status of Labour’s “traditional” support – the “core vote” residing in the “heartlands”. One wonders where in the pecking order this leaves the non-white working-class residents of Grenfell Tower, for example. It would be unfortunate if the answer to that question were to be found in the expressions of sympathy one hears from some Labour figures for people “anxious about … the rate of change of communities”. Labour neither has nor deserves a future as the party of those who don’t want black and brown people moving into their street.
One big lesson from the election on 8 June is that Labour is at its most effective when at its boldest: persuading from progressive principle rather than validating rightwing attitudes and alienating its own political base. This, sadly, appears to be something even Jeremy Corbyn forgot when referring on the Andrew Marr Show last Sunday to the “wholesale importation of underpaid workers from central Europe in order to destroy conditions, particularly in the construction industry”.
Here Corbyn overemphasised marginal and unrepresentative instances, obscuring the fact that it is neoliberalism, not immigration, that pushes down wages and tears up worker protections. Labour is right to reject the reckless idea that last year’s democratic vote should be somehow cancelled, and clearly needs to win the support of a proportion of leave voters. But casting around for a socialist alibi for deferring to anti-immigration sentiment is entirely the wrong approach.
Experienced pro-migration campaigners know Corbyn as a rare and reliable Labour ally in the dark days when Tony Blair was passing one piece of draconian anti-migrant legislation after another, driving public opinion rightward in the process. The real hope for turning the current situation around lies in the other great lesson of 8 June: that dramatic political change can be driven by such campaigners from the bottom up. It is time for Labour’s grassroots army to take up the task of shifting public attitudes on immigration, creating a new, inclusive country, and breaking down those us-and-them mentalities that can only be an obstacle to progressive politics.